Catching up with CNY native Zane Lamprey, TV’s touring drinker
Zane Lamprey has constructed a vocation as a ingesting traveler. Or perhaps a touring drinker.
Possibly way, that hasn’t precisely been a ticket to achievement in 2020, the yr of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I’m a male who hosts vacation demonstrates about the hospitality market,” Lamprey mentioned. “Let’s just say that business enterprise has been sluggish.”
Lamprey is a 1990 graduate of Fayetteville-Manlius Superior Faculty who went to school at SUNY Cortland. He’s a TV host and stand-up comedian perhaps greatest-acknowledged for cable network reveals like “Three Sheets” and “Drinking Built Uncomplicated.”
The shows authorized him to journey to worldwide and domestic locales and consume exotic libations — and gain a residing accomplishing it. Nevertheless the need for these kinds of reveals, or at least the availability of networks willing to air them, has been drying up.
But it is also shortly to announce a previous contact for Lamprey, who lives in Los Angeles. He nevertheless has tips and energy.
Amongst other endeavors, he hosts a podcast and has an on the web gift store called Adv3nture. He has worked as a producer and director, as nicely as a host.
He also introduced a stick to-up clearly show called “Four Sheets” and was meant to be right now in the midst of a 71-city tour, named Laughs ‘n Drafts, that combines his stand-up act with visits to craft breweries around the nation (including Central New York).
Covid place those people last two ideas on hold. And he hasn’t been ready to occur back again home to Central New York in a lot more than yr to stop by his mother, Ann, and sister, Amy, and the lots of childhood good friends who nonetheless envy the way he helps make a residing.
He has been in contact with his “Drinking Built Easy” sidekick Steve McKenna, who he satisfied at SUNY Cortland.

Zane Lamprey, right, is a Fayetteville-Manlius grad who hosted the Television show “Drinking Produced Straightforward.” At remaining is sidekick Steve McKenna, who Lamprey achieved at SUNY Cortland.
In the meantime, he lately won an honor that sounds a bit company for the ingesting traveler / traveling drinker.
The Craft Beer Marketing and advertising Awards named Lamprey as the receiver of its 2020 “Man of the Year” Award. This is the first 12 months that award — aka the “Crushy” — has been offered.
Could it be that it recognizes a “lifetime achievement” in marketing craft beer? Lamprey, who is 48, is not all set to go there.
“It’s funny, but I’m not completed nonetheless,” he mentioned. “Yes I have done what I can to marketplace and endorse craft beer‚ but I’m not completely ready to cap my lifetime yet.”
As significantly as beer goes, Lamprey claims his favorites “are going to be a lager, or a thing dim, like a porter.”
He recognizes that hops are sizzling, supplied all the IPAs on the current market, especially for younger drinkers. So on that level he will make a concession to having more mature.
“The even bigger the IBUs (the measurement of hop bitterness), the far more probably I am to fall to slide asleep after getting just one,” he mentioned. “That’s what happens following a certain age.”
And but, he says, “I am still the strong drinker that I constantly was, or possibly was. I’m social, and consuming for me is a massive element of remaining social.”
Now he’s performing on designs to resume the stand-up / brewery tour in 2021, assuming the pandemic eases up.
Following all, it brings together his two passions.
“I’m nonetheless genuinely in to journey, to pay a visit to locations and taste and expertise someone’s craft,” he mentioned. “The thrill of that is almost certainly infinite, to go to the breweries and distilleries and the destinations exactly where people today are generating fantastic issues.”
And consuming?
“I drink for unique factors now,” he mentioned. “Back at a sure point it was consuming to have pleasurable. Now it is extra about the discovery, the journey. It’s far more about the merchandise than the effect.”

Zane Lamprey in a scene from his Television demonstrate “Consuming Produced Effortless.”
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Don Cazentre writes about craft beer, wine, spirits and beverages for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Write-up-Normal. Arrive at him at [email protected], or abide by him at NYup.com, on Twitter or Facebook.